Writing a Memoir Hurts
Childhood monsters of loss, sadness, and pain might hide under the bed.
I never expected it to be this hard. Possibly, writing a memoir while feeling lonely during the forced isolation of a pandemic is not the wisest choice I’ve ever made. Or, just maybe, it’s given me the time to dig deeper than I might otherwise have done.
“In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right,” Karr writes in The Art of Memoir.
I was born in July 1953. In August, Alfred Kinsey released his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. It shocked the world with its explicit revelations and implied permission for women to embrace their sexuality.
Four days later, the Soviet Premier, Georgy Malenkov, announced that the United States no longer had a monopoly on the hydrogen bomb.
I’m not sure which was more explosive, but both reflected the changes to follow during my lifetime and my recent understanding of my mother.
But the most shocking changes have occurred in my heart as I’ve delved into history and the first-person writing of my mother.
My mother wanted to be a writer. She’d also moved to Alaska to homestead, thousands of miles from her own mom in California.
At least once a week for eight years, she wrote to her mom, with the explicit understanding that my grandmother would return all the letters. My mother never wrote her book, but after her death, my older sister retrieved all the letters, deciphered the faded writing on the thin airmail paper, and transcribed them into a thousand typewritten pages.
Included with the letters were the return correspondence from my grandmother along with notes of passion— and hate — between my parents. There were also childish cards from myself and my siblings, along with my mom’s journals and letters, written in the 1940s.
With trepidation, I began to read a unique chance to re-enter my childhood through my dead mother's words.
We lived a tumultuous childhood in Alaska.
Unbelievable. I knew we’d move often, but I read that during our first three years in Alaska, we’d moved 17 times. My mother was never diagnosed with mental illness, but her life was filled with the difficulties of untreated depression and mania. She dragged six children on her roller-coaster journey until we all left home as soon as possible.
For unknown reasons, my father stayed with her for 35 years.
As I read, a narrow crevice of compassion crept into my hate-hardened heart.
Before I spent weeks reading the letters and reliving the years they described, I’d felt only disdain and anger for my mother. She had abused my siblings, damaged and hurt our family.
Mom would have never allowed any of us to read these letters while she was alive. Her accounts of what happened were often sanitized for my grandmother’s eyes, though she could not hide her confusion and sorrow.
My mom’s feelings of insecurity and loneliness are heartbreaking to read.
She’d brought an idealized image of the perfect housewife with her from the fifties suburbs of California to the Alaskan wilderness. Also, she craved the approval of my grandmother, who was a psychology professor, long before it was a common job for women. From their correspondence, I realized my mom yearned for her own mother’s approval and constantly tried to win her affection.
After World War Two ended, the American woman returned home from the factories and offices to fill the new subdivisions with children. At the same time, the returning GIs worked and went to university. My mom was fearful of becoming an old maid when she married at 23.
On television, radio, and in women’s magazines, official campaigns insisted it was women’s patriotic duty to stay home and cook. While staying slim and sexy!
I read my mother’s description of how her doctor prescribed Diet Pills, amphetamines, criticizing her weight while pregnant with my younger brother.
My impetuous mother complained she had only fifty cents for a week’s worth of groceries, while in the same letter, she described buying an expensive outfit and purebred dog for herself.
I felt ashamed to read her arrogant criticism of our neighbors, whom she called ‘low class’. Letters document in excruciating detail her obsessive housecleaning while we had no electricity or running water.
Recollections of happy times spent with my younger sister and my little brothers contrast with memories of isolation and loneliness as the years passed.
My mother’s letters abruptly ended the year I was twelve.
I don’t know if she quit writing or if the letters were lost before she died. I can’t imagine what more she might have said; the pain erased her memories, easing the torture they caused her.
At least from this point, I was old enough to remember the ensuing years as the world seemed to spin faster and faster.
1969, on my sister’s fourteenth birthday, on a transistor radio, we listened to the words of Neil Armstrong as he stepped on to the moon, That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
The next month, a half-million young people converged on Woodstock, where I yearned to be, far from Alaska. My older brother dodged the draft in Oregon, and my parents sent my older sister to Navy boot camp.
1970, Kent State, the spreading war in Vietnam, the Beatles broke up, and I embraced ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’.
In 1971, at eighteen, I was married.
Despite our scars, my siblings and I raised ourselves—alone and with our love for each other.
Finally, I’m able to accept the fleeting image in the mirror that reveals how I resemble her as I grow older.
I can reconcile the knowledge that she did horrible things with the fact that 50% of my genetics is hers. I’m thankful my sister saved the letters I wanted to discard and grateful for the insight they’ve given me.
I’m beginning to believe she wasn’t evil; her life reflected her family’s history and the times in which she lived, as does my own.
She lived in an era that asked too much of some women and provided no place of sanctuary for those needing help.